Tutorial: Working with the Vignette Panel

October 6, 2009

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While there is a Vignette panel in Lightroom 1 it was intended to be a correction tool for fixing the slightly dark edges around a photo that can result from using certain combinations of filters and lenses. It worked OK for that purpose, but many people enjoyed using it more as a creative tool to add a darkening (or lightening) effect to the edge of some photos. The only problem was that Lightroom 1 only applies the vignette to the outer edge of the source photo, so if you also crop that same photo in Lightroom 1 you risk cropping away the vignette effect as well. Lightroom 2 remedied that problem with a significant enhancement to the Vignette panel that added new controls for creating “post-crop” vignettes strictly for creative purposes. Let’s take a look.

The Vignette panel in Lightroom 2 contains two sets of Vignette controls:

Lens Correction: This section works just like the controls in Lightroom 1, which are intended to correct an actual vignette problem. The effect is only applied to the outer edge of the original photo, but not the cropped version.

Post-Crop: This is a new set of controls that are strictly for creative purposes and will automatically be reapplied after any subsequent cropping is performed.

In this tutorial I’d like to specifically focus on the new set of sliders in the Post-Crop section.